Reviews, August 2015

Touch —
Claire North

When
2015’s Touch
begins, things are not going well for protagonist Kepler, who has
just been shot twice by a complete stranger. Things are worse for
Kepler’s host, Josephine Cebula, She is trapped in her own dying
body; Kepler can escape into any living body within arm’s reach.

Kepler
has no idea why the stranger attacked. The body-hopper does know
that, for some reason, killing Josephine appeared to be as or more
important than killing Kepler. Possessing the killer is easy enough, which gives Kepler the killer’s effects to rummage through for clues but that
turns out to be just the first and least step on the way to finding
Kepler’s real enemy.

The Big Time —
Fritz Leiber
Change War , book 1

Fritz
Leiber’s 1958 Hugo winner
The
Big Time
fits
a very large setting into a very small package. The context of the
novel is the Change War, which is being fought to reshape history
across the universe. Narrator Greta, doppelganger of a slain American
woman, has a very minor role in the war; she is an entertainer in
the Place, an R&R facility tucked away in a pocket universe.
Unfortunately for Greta’s life of routine, the War is about to
intrude into the Place.

Cyberpunk: Malaysia —
Zen Cho

It
may seem a little odd to publish a cyberpunk anthology a quarter
century after American cyberpunk devolved into an aggregation of
simplistic conventions
1. But sub-genres may die in some cultural
environments and thrive in others. American
2 cyberpunk may be a
shambling zombie (even post-cyberpunk is pretty wheezy), but as
2015’s
Cyberpunk:
Malaysia
proves, in Malaysian hands cyberpunk is alive and well.

Victory on Janus —
Andre Norton
Janus, book 2

1965’s The Year of the Unicorn takes us back to the Witch World, across the ocean to High Hallack

Andre
Norton’s 19661Victory
on Janus
returns
to the bleak world of 1963’s
Judgment
on Janus
.
Victory
isn’t as grim a book as
Judgment,
but it is still nothing like upbeat.

The
Ift, reborn in commandeered and transformed human bodies after
millennia of extinction, are still a mere handful. Lacking numbers,
their survival is due only to the fact the human colonists on Janus
are largely unaware of and consequently indifferent to the alien revenants.

Or
rather, were. Now the colonists are burning the vast forests around
their settlements. If the Ift cannot find out why the humans are
doing this, and convince them to stop, then it is only a matter of
time before the Ift are cast back into unending darkness.

Skye-Object 3270a —
Linda Nagata
Deception Well, book 3

2010’s Skye-Object 3270a is a late addition to Nagata’s Nanotech Chronicles1. While it shares a setting with 1998’s Deception Well, this book can be read as a standalone. It is explicitly intended for a younger audience than Vast.

Despite the “object” in her name, Skye-Object isn’t a what but a who, a young woman.

Her odd name is a reminder of her history; she was found, as a toddler, in suspended animation in a starship’s lifeboat. The astronomer who first noticed it had tagged it as Sky Object 3270a. Skye’s rescuers were never able to determine the lifeboat’s origin or Skye’s original name. They were kind enough to give Skye a new home in the city of Silk.

The rescuers can make an educated guess as to why Skye’s parents cast her into the deeps of space. Unfortunately, that guess is … incomplete.

Bryony and Roses —
T. Kingfisher

The author lurking behind the pen name T. Kingfisher is perhaps best known for routinely kicking me out of the #2 position on Livejournal. She is also a Hugo-winning author whose books are well worth sampling. Case in point: 2015’s Bryony and Roses.

When we first meet Bryony, she’s finally found something that distracts her from a recent avalanche of catastrophe:

her mother died;

her father indulged in ill-conceived schemes to marry off his three daughters, showing total indifference to their feelings in the matter;

he fell into debt;

he was murdered;

the sisters fled from the city into impoverished rustic seclusion.

Bryony’s current predicament is the ultimate distraction: she is freezing to death in an unexpected spring blizzard.

She is saved when she finds a manor house where no manor house was before or should be now. Inside, she finds no visible host or servants, but she does find food, warmth, and shelter from the storm.

Devil or Angel & Other Stories —
Matthew Hughes

I’ve reviewed Hughes here before and I will review him again in the future.

Although he is perhaps best known for his Vancian Archonate stories, those do not make up the entirety of his work. Devil or Angel & Other Stories collects sixteen of his non-Archonate stories [1], written deliberately in what the cover calls “old-style.” Which is to say that it would not come as a surprise to find that these stories had been published in such magazines of yore as Unknown,Galaxy, or even theMagazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Except that they weren’t [2].

The Northern Girl —
Elizabeth A. Lynn
Chronicles of Tornor, book 3

Elizabeth
A. Lynn’s 1980’s The
Northern Girl, is
the
third
book in the Chronicles
of Tornor.
As was the custom of those ancient days, the book works as a
standalone. While reading the first two books would
provide interesting context for this work, you don’t need to have
read those books to understand this one. As I recall, the first two
were good but this one is the longest and most ambitious of the
three. It’s also not your bog-standard secondary world fantasy.

Half-a-millennium
after its founding, Kendra-on-the-Delta is arguably the greatest of
the cities of Arun, the land stretching from the Grey Hills to the
ocean. To date, Arun has been not so much a nation or kingdom as a
collection of loosely allied city-states and holdings. Now, thanks to
the ambitions of a few ambitious men, all that may be about to change.

One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night —
Christopher Brookmyre

I
got inexplicably not named Ia(i)n Christopher Brookmyre’s 1999 standalone novel
One
Fine Day in the Middle of the Night
for my 40
birthday
many years ago;
it seems like yesterday!

William
Conner is a career soldier turned mercenary turned, finally, criminal
and goon wrangler for Dawson, whose current scheme requires a small
band of hard bastards. Called in at the last moment, Conner has
assembled a small army on the coast of Scotland near the unremarkable
town of Auchelea.

It’s
not the town that has soldier-for-hire Dawson’s attention. It’s the
oil platform converted into a lavish holiday resort floating offshore
of Auchelea. Though not quite finished, the resort is said to be
playing host to a group of wealthy venture capitalists, who would be
well worth the gang’s time to kidnap.

The
idea that they are all billionaire entrepreneurs would be a hell of a
surprise to the former students of Auchelea’s St. Michael’s high
school, the people who are actually using the converted
platform/resort for their school reunion.

Postmarked the Stars —
Andre Norton
Solar Queen, book 4

Although a decade passed for Norton’s fans between the third Solar Queen novel (1959’s Voodoo Planet) and the fourth (1969’s Postmarked the Stars), for protagonist Dane Thorson, the events of this book Postmarked the Stars, follow right on the heels of the earlier three.

Dane’s appointment as temporary cargo chief on the Solar Queen, replacing a superior on holiday, seems like it should be a good thing. All it does is paint a great big target on poor Dane. Ne’er do wells are plotting to use the ship for nefarious purposes. This becomes obvious when Dane, having set out to pick up a parcel for transport, wakes up from a drugged stupor in an unfamiliar room. When he staggers back to the Solar Queen, he finds that he has been replaced by a look-alike.

Temporarily. The look-alike in fact was in such terrible health he had no business trying to travel; he dies of an unexpected heart condition even before Dane gets back to the Solar Queen. There’s no way to ask him what he was up to. But that’s OK; the results of the doppleganger’s shenanigans are revealed in short order.

War Games —
Karl Hansen
Hybrid Wars, book 1

It’s
a good thing that the title for this review series is Military
Speculative Fiction That Doesn’t Suck
and not, say, Military
Speculative Fiction That is an Exemplar of All That is Good in
Fiction.
I’m not sure that I would say that Karl Hansen’s 1981 War
Games
is good.
That may be too positive a word for this enthusiastically nihilistic
war story. The book has definite points of interest—but I am not
100% sure I would call it good.

The Drowning City —
Amanda Downum
The Necromancer Chronicles, book 1

Amanda
Downum’s 2009 debut novel The
Drowning City,
first of the Necromancer
Chronicles,
takes us to the exotic city of Symir, a city balanced between ocean,
river, and volcano. As the city’s sobriquet “The Drowning City”
suggests, water has a slight edge over fire at present. To
necromancer Isyllt Iskaldur, who has spent three weeks sailing from
her homeland of Selafai, the Drowning City is exciting and novel.
Most importantly it’s a potentially useful catspaw in the ongoing
struggle between Selafai and the Assari Empire.

For
the people who live in Symir, the city isn’t exotic at all. It’s
home. And as convenient as it would be for Isyllt and her spymaster
boss if the Symirians were willing to become naive pawns in the
Selafian plots, the Symirians have their own complex relationships
with the Empire of which they are a reluctant part. They have no
intention of playing along with Isyllt’s cunning plans.

In
fact, the locals have their own cunning plans and Isyllt will be
doing quite well to survive contact with them.

The Fifth Season —
N. K. Jemisin
The Broken Earth, book 1

The
unfortunates in 2015’s The
Fifth Season
live on a world almost as active as Jupiter’s moon Io, a world
constantly rattled by tremours and reshaped by volcanoes, a world
where geological and historical timescales are the same.

Any
particular community on this world can be certain that, in time, it
will be wiped out by earthquake, tsunami, acid rain, or abrupt
climate change. Humanity as a whole survives on the Stillness because
until now, no calamity massive enough to kill absolutely every human
has happened.

Thanks
to the forward-thinking social policies of the Sanze Empire,
humanity’s run of luck is about to end.

Mind of My Mind —
Octavia E. Butler
Patternist, book 2

1977’s
Mind of
My Mind,
second in Octavia E. Butler’s Patternist
series [1], is Butler’s take on classic Science Fiction themes: an
examination of a world where mental powers are real rather than the
delusions of the confused, the bewildered, and the fans of Analog.

Like Telzey Amberdon and Paul Maud’Dib, Mary
is a Campbellian superhuman. Born to a
latent telepath and another psychic, Mary has potential mental powers
that could dwarf anything ever seen on the Earth of the late 20 century!

Soon I Will Be Invincible —
Austin Grossman

“I’m the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public,
and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who
could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill,
and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle
through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I
have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And
whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he
could do with his life.”

No,
he hasn’t. And thanks to Malign Hypercognition Syndrome, Doctor
Impossible won’t. Probably can’t. When his old foe CoreFire vanishes,
CoreFire’s old teammates don’t take long to decide that even though
Doctor Impossible is in prison, he is the logical suspect.

Dark Piper —
Andre Norton

The
good news for the poor doomed bastards on the planet Beltane in
1968’s Dark
Piper
is that the great interstellar war is finally over. Even better, while the world lost many of its young men to the draft,
Beltane itself is such a backwater that neither side saw fit to scorch the place.

The
bad news is that the war didn’t so much stop as grind to a halt after all the
combatant polities suddenly collapsed. A long dark age looms, perhaps
even the end of mankind’s long domination of the stars. Since Beltane
was a research station that was never intended to be completely
self-sufficient, the inhabitants might be able to slow the looming
technological and economic decline … but they cannot hope to
prevent it.

Space Viking —
H. Beam Piper
Space Viking, book 1

I
will probably review all of my H. Beam Piper novels (or at least the
SF ones) eventually. I have a specific reason for reviewing 1962’s Space Viking
this week. A reason I will not explain until Friday. Foreshadowing! The mark of quality literature!

Speaking
of foreshadowing, when Lady Elaine warns her husband-to-be Lucas,
Lord Trask, Baron of Traskon that

“It’s
bad luck to be called by your married name before the wedding.”

Trask
should have listened. For that matter, every aristocrat on the planet
Gram should have noticed just how crazy Lord Andray Dunnan was, and
what a bad idea it was to allow Dunnan to assemble his own private
army. Elaine and Trask in particular have good reason to be worried:
through no fault of her own, Elaine plays a central role in Dunnan’s rich fantasy life. But …
Dunnan is the nephew of Duke Angus, who is poised to make himself
king of all Gram. Dunnan is too well-connected to be shot out of
hand, so everyone tacitly tolerates his obvious craziness.

Then
everything goes pear-shaped. Dunnan’s men hijack the starship
Enterprise;
in retrospect, the purpose for which Dunnan recruited all those
mercenaries. Dunnan tries to assassinate Elaine (for rejecting him)
and Trask (for winning her) before fleeing in the Enterprise.
Dunnan’s
mistake is
to kill Elaine, but only wound Trask. While the aristocracy of Gram
may not be inclined to pursue their vendetta into space, nothing will
stop Trask from chasing Dunnan to the ends of the galaxy.

Justice and Her Brothers —
Virginia Hamilton
Justice Cycle, book 1

I
am continually surprised at the depth and width of my ignorance. Case
in point: Virginia Hamilton, an award winning author
who was previously unknown to me. I got to be one of yesterday’s
lucky ten thousand; now you can be too [1].

Like
most adolescents, Justice Douglass—“Tice” to her parents and
friends, “Pickle” to her brothers Thomas and Levi—has to deal
with change. In particular, Justice finds herself resenting her
mother’s late-blooming college career. Each hour her mother invests
in schoolwork is an hour less for Justice and her brothers.

It
eventually becomes clear that Justice is worrying about the wrong
thing. She should be paying more attention to her twin brothers.
Thomas and Levi are mirror twins. They may look alike, but one is
right handed, one left, one is a leader, one a follower, one is a
victim and one … one is a monster….

Beauty Queens —
Libba Bray

Yesterday
I said

I
may or may not also review some of the works that made it onto the
(Tiptree) Honor Lists and the Long Lists; the limiting factors are
time, my puckish whimsy, and whether or not anyone sees fit to
sponsor those reviews.

It
turns out another factor is “James wrote this review before
deciding to do the Tiptree Reviews and does not care to sit on it for
a year.” Also, puckish whimsy!

It’s
completely unfair to the books I review but … I must admit that how
favourably I react to a book can depend a lot on the circumstances in
which I encounter it. Case in point: Libba Bray’s 2011 novel Beauty Queens.

The
novel opens with fifty contestants plus ancillary personnel on their
way to the Miss Dream Teen beauty contest. Fear not that you will
have to keep a bewildering array of names straight: the plane crashes
on page three. Of the fifty contestants, thirteen [1] survive. Of
their chaperons and other support personnel, none survive. A baker’s
dozen of contestants are lost on a deserted island, far from help,
left to their own devices, with only the wreckage of the plane and
the skills they brought with them to help them survive.

A Woman of the Iron People —
Eleanor Arnason

Eleanor
Arnason’s 1991 A
Woman of the Iron People
was one of the two winners of the very first James Tiptree, Jr.
Award. It also won the inaugural Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult
Literature and came in third in the 1992 John W. Campbell Memorial
Award. Even in the Before Times, when computers were coal-fired and
USENET still ruled the interwebs, A
Woman of the Iron People
got very good word of mouth … so it has been a considerable source
of irritation to me that despite decades of bookstore browsing, I had
never seen a copy of the hardcover or the split paperback versions
(of which more later).

Huzzah
for Open Road Media, which offers a very affordably priced edition!
Huzzah for my various electronic devices, which allow me to read said edition!

Despite
some very impressive efforts, humanity has failed to transform Earth
into an anoxic, lifeless desolation (which says a lot for Earth, given the rampant resource plunder and widespread pollution in the backstory). Moreover, a
surprisingly sensible humanity has spent centuries trying to undo the
damage it did in the 20th
century. About a century before the book begins, humans even managed
to build and then send a sub-light starship to Sigma Draconis.
This sun-like star is not too far from good old Sol on a galactic
scale; but it is unimaginably far on a human scale … which is why
it took a starship travelling at a good fraction of the speed of light more than a century to reach its destination.

Like
the sun, Sigma Draconis has an Earth-like companion world, and like
Earth, that world has intelligent inhabitants. Humanity’s first
interstellar voyage is also going to be its first contact with aliens.

The Diploids and Other Flights of Fancy —
Katherine MacLean

I
have been listening to the old radio show X
Minus One
.
Because her stories provided the basis of several episodes, Katherine
MacLean (last seen here in my review of her Missing Man)
has been on my mind. Hence this review. The Diploids and Other Flights of Fancy (or as it is called in my edition,

The Diploids and 7 Other Stories),
collects a number of her works from the 1950s.

By
purest coincidence, I recently encountered someone who had never read
MacLean’s much-anthologized “The Snowball Effect.” [1] That does
not make me want to read this collection more than I already do—but
it does convince me that now is a good time to review this (sadly
obscure and wildly out of print) collection.

Sorceress of the Witch World —
Andre Norton
Estcarp, book 5

1968’s
Sorceress
of the Witch World
picks up where Warlock
of the Witch World
left off. Kaththea is still recovering from being stripped of her
magic by her brother (done to save her from a mistaken alliance with
the extremely hunky forces of darkness). When she is separated from
her friends by an avalanche, her magic cannot save her.

Kitty and the Midnight Hour —
Carrie Vaughn
Kitty Norville, book 1

Even
by 2005, when Carrie Vaughn’s [1] Kitty
and the Midnight Hour
was first published, I had read a great many urban
fantasies/paranormal romances (courtesy of Andrew Wheeler at
Bookspan), I had read enough of these to understand that although the
Kitty Norville books share many of the surface features common to the
genre, the series is more than a little different under the hood.

When
we first meet her, Kitty Norville is a late-night radio DJ on
Denver’s radio K-NOB; she is obscure and seemingly fated to stay that
way. This changes dramatically when she more or less by accident
discovers a brand new niche for late-night call-in shows: the
Midnight Hour becomes the show you call if you’re a werewolf, a
vampire, or a vampire’s thrall, and you need to talk to someone
about the unusual demands your condition imposes on you.

Kaoru Mori: Anything and Something —
Kaoru Mori

When
Yen Press sent me Emma
Volume One, they also sent me 2012’s Kaoru
Mori: Anything and Something. Unlike
A
Bride’s Story
and Emma,
this isn’t an installment in an ongoing series. Rather, it is a
collection of Mori’s short pieces, an interesting introduction to her
work if you’ve not read her before.

This
will be short.

Mori
provides such number of short pieces that they exceed my willingness
to take this chapter by chapter. The volume is just under 210 pages
and there are forty-four items listed in the table of contents. I
could take them one by one, but that would result in a very long
review. It has been my experience that the longer my reviews, the
less likely it is that people will respond to them. As someone once
said, More Words, Deeper Hole.

Mori
leads with a selection of longer pieces (although if you have not
noticed that the collection is to be read right to left, you may
think she’s ending with longer pieces inexplicably printed in
reverse). These tend to be standalone pieces, essentially short
stories. The second half of the book has a selection of shorter
pieces, some single page and other, like the extensive study of
corsets, somewhat longer.

Although
this isn’t a long collection, the number of works included means that
the author can cover a fair range in terms of subject matter and
tone. There’s screwball comedy, what appears to be a melancholy
lesbian romance (or whatever you call it when neither person admits
that’s what’s going on), something that may be intended to be to
Bunny fantasies what “Hotel California” is to the American Dream,
non-fiction, and more. Not bad for a book that’s not much over 200 pages.

The
author also includes, where appropriate, commentary on the various pieces.

If
you haven’t given Mori a try, this is a pretty good place to start.
It’s not long, so you are not investing a lot of time, but the number
and variety of pieces included means that a reader will get a pretty
good idea of Mori’s range.

Up Against It —
M. J. Locke

I
like stories set in the Solar System, particularly the modern Solar
System as it has been revealed since the 1960s. Or at least I tell
myself I do. Paradoxically, my interest in such matters makes me a
difficult audience for SF that qualifies, as I suspect this review
of 2011’s Up Against It will reveal.

The
Solar System of the 24
century is settled; humans live everywhere from the inner system out
to the Kuiper Belt. While life in space, such as in 25 Phocaea, for
example, is better than life in 24
century USA [1], that’s less a measure of the wonders of life in
space and more a measure of the grimdark hellhole that is Future
America [2]. Life in space is fragile; cities like 25 Phocaea’s
Zekeston are dependent on imported volatiles. Very dependent.

And
what happens when the supply of volatiles is suddenly interrupted?

2014’s
[1] How
the White Trash Zombie Got Her Groove Back,
fourth in the series, picks up after Angel Crawford has made a good
start at rebuilding her new life after the calamities—flood and
various wacky series arc hijinks—that swept through her town in
White
Trash Zombie Apocalypse.
Angel even got her GED after a lot of studying and some private
tutoring that helped her to deal with her dyslexia. So that’s good.

The
dead friend who turns up buried in a shallow grave? The wave of
kidnappings that sweeps St. Edwards Parish? The fact that Saberton,
the malevolent corporation eager to exploit zombieism regardless of
the cost to the zombies (and given that at one point they seemed on
the verge of triggering a zombie plague, the cost to the world),
seems to be back for another swing at the undead piñata? Not so
good. And that’s not ever mentioning the brand new, progressive
disorder with which both Angel and her spawn Philip are struggling.

A Wrinkle in Time —
Madeleine L'Engle
Meg Murry, book 1

1962’s
A
Wrinkle in Time
won a Newbery, even though it features no dying dogs or other pets and no child drowns tragically in a beloved creek. A star does
explode but that happens before the book opens. The Newbery and the
book’s heavy-handed Christian imagery gave the work enough of a
patina of respectability that schools would stock it—even though it
was pretty obviously spec-fic. Despite the official imprimatur, kids
liked it enough to actually read it for pleasure. It still has a high
enough profile that the net
abounds in reviews.

The Way We Fall —
Megan Crewe
The Fallen World, book 1

Megan
Crewe’s 2012 novel The
Way We Fall
takes us to a small Canadian island, the island that narrator Kaelyn
calls home. Sixteen year old Kaelyn’s life hasn’t been all that
smooth of late. Her father didn’t react particularly well to the
revelation that his son Drew is gay; in fact, he moved the whole
family back to the island, away from Toronto, to distance Drew from
his boyfriend. Kaelyn is also saddened by a jealousy-fueled
falling-out with her best friend Leo.

Two
years after the quarrel, Kaelyn belatedly regrets the rupture. Her
sudden epiphany about how much she misses Leo comes too late; he has
left for school on the mainland. In lieu of conversations with him,
Kaelyn begins addressing each of her journal entries to Leo. It’s
good practice; after all, what are the odds Leo will never return to
the island? Who could imagine that life as Kaelyn knows it is about
to be irrevocably transformed?

Did
I mention The
Way We Fall
is volume one in the Fallen
World
trilogy?